[ClikeX]

It's a choice you need to make when developing.

I had to build a one-time export yesterday. Am I gonna spend a lot of time optimizing the speed of it? Or am I going to make it work and get the export to the client faster?

It would've wasted my time and the clients money if I optimized the queries. Sure, the export itself took longer. But overall, the task was done quicker.

If the client wanted this export to run on their server frequently, I would've spend the time making sure the export itself runs faster.

[PeterisP]

It's especially relevant when thinking not at the level of computer systems but business systems - since for many tasks you anyway have a combined computer+people process that works for some goal, and there's a tradeoff between computers and people for choosing the level of automation you want.

For exmaple, in your example of a one-time export it might also make sense to write code that does not meet all requirements and explicitly can not handle certain edge cases, if it's more effective to fix these cases manually than try to automate that.

[taneq]

Exactly. Yout goal isn’t to optimise the code, it’s to optimise the overall cost/benefit of whatever you’re doing.